Best Beach Reading List for Women in Leadership

The best leadership reads to help you uplevel your skills this summer.

One of my New Year's resolutions for 2018 was to read more. For good reasons. It's a fact: People who read books live longer. And truthfully, as I have said before, leadership development is a demanding field--one that requires staying abreast of new perspectives and learning from authors beyond our own particular industries.

Now that summer is here, I'm happy to say that I am enjoying my resolution and am eager to share some new book titles with you. So, as you throw your bathing suit and sunblock into that beach or pool carryall, consider adding one of the books I've suggested below, whether it's to help uplevel your leadership abilities over the summer or to offset that summer blockbuster page-turner you just tucked in your bag.

I appreciated Snow's storytelling, which made the book an enjoyable read, and his insights based on history, business, neuroscience, and psychology. It's a fabulous book, and I believe you'll enjoy it.

Next up is Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership by Michael Ventura. In this Business Insider Best Book, Ventura describes the power of empathy, and how that quality may be what your company needs to connect, innovate, and grow. Ventura is an entrepreneur and the CEO of the award-winning strategy and design firm Sub Rosa. He has worked with brands like Google, Warby Parker, Nike, and General Electric, and organizations including the United Nations and the Obama administration.

In a world where we face the reality of digitalization and our increasing reliance on technology like artificial intelligence and augmented reality, the need for soft skills like empathy is vital. Bear in mind that the people who program this technology upon which we depend come to the work with their biases--and those can easily be incorporated in the development and coding processes. One of the key skills for those of us in leadership is, and will continue to be, emotional competence; the ability to empathize with, motivate, and engage our teams.

Applied Empathy provides the reader with a framework for building diverse teams that can be successful in our new global marketplace.

Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done by Laura Vanderkam describes seven principles that time-free people have adopted. "Time-free?" you exclaim. Who would describe themselves as time-free in today's hectic world? It turns out, plenty of people do, because they embrace the seven almost counterintuitive principles outlined in Vanderkam's book. Her book includes descriptions of "mindset shifts to help you feel calm on the busiest days and tools to help you get more done without feeling overwhelmed."

This book is packed with helpful information and examples of how people using these principles are learning to apply new thinking to formerly chaotic schedules and lives. I found several invaluable pointers in the book that I plan to use in my own life, and I suspect you may as well. Give it a read. I recommend it highly.

Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges by Amy Cuddy is a book I often recommend to my coaching clients. Cuddy, who gave the second most popular TED Talk ever, writes about the differences between authentic and inauthentic behavior, and between social power and personal power.

At this point, your instinctive response may be like this one: "I don't read self-help books," writes Laura McNeal in a Goodreads review. "Metaphorically I'm a 17-year-old hearing that it would be better to start my homework on Saturday instead of Sunday night at eight. My inner voice screams, 'I KNOOOOOOOOW.' " If so, read on: "I was in deep danger of switching from the Bold Self initiative to my default setting, which is Holden Caulfield at the end of his madman weekend in New York. And yet I kept reading, and it got to a point where I was curled up on the sofa with a highlighter in my hand...." McNeal gave the book four out of five stars in her review.

Cuddy describes the differences between powerless poses and powerful poses and recommends adopting confident power poses and body language until the reader can become her authentic best self." As a social psychologist, Cuddy bases her work on her research and is considered a leader among " 'next generation' authors and academics who are pioneering evidence-based approaches," according to a review by Bridgette Beyers.

Try thisone and then let me know how you enjoyed it, and whether you found it as helpful and inspiring as I have.

Finally, I give you Thrive, by Arianna Huffington. Thrive is Huffington's account of how she manages the challenges of her career and raising her two daughters. It is an intensely personal book, one that begins by describing her "a-ha! moments" after her physical collapse upon falling and injuring herself due to exhaustion. Huffington points out the reality too many people discover the hard way: The dogged pursuit of money and power leads to stress and burnout and a lessening in the quality of our lives and our careers. Thrive provides the groundwork and a blueprint for revolutionizing the way we think, work, and live. I thought it was a fantastic book and I believe you will too.